Salience Engine

Definition:

The Salience Engine is a set of tools that I created in order to simplify routing players to the correct conversation based on external factors. It is designed to work as an add-on on top of Yarn Spinner.

Background:

The general design (and name) was influenced by a blog post by Emily Short detailing alternatives to branching narratives. In that post, Short describes salience-based narratives as

[...] interactive narratives that pick a bit of content out of a large pool depending on which content element is judged to be most applicable at the moment.

The Salience Engine was designed to achieve that same goal - picking the most relevant content from a large pool - but, it differs in one particularly noteworthy way: it is embedded into an otherwise branching narrative structure, so rather than picking out little bits of content, it instead picks out large branches.

Development of the Salience Engine has ceased. The primary intent was to use it in my current project (as the text content of the project is too large and interconnected to effectively manage using branches alone), but I have since switched to using Ink, which mitigates many of those issues.

Further Reading:

If you're interested in more details about the Salience Engine, I've written about it in the following blog posts:

• Salient Branches: In the first post dedicated to the topic, I provide a broad overview of the motivation for creating the Salience Engine, and a general description of how an early version works.
• Salience As Routing: A follow-up post to the previous one, where I describe how the Salience Engine resolves specific routing challenges - thereby enabling me to write stories that might otherwise be unmaintainable.
• Yarn Command Attributes Part 3 and Part 4: In my four-part series about Yarn Command Attributes (and their alternatives), parts 3 and 4 explain how I've organized my Yarn Commands - which are a key part of transferring data between the Salience Engine and Yarn Spinner.
• Validation Through Use: In this status update, I briefly explain how I came to use ANTLR as a part of the Salience Engine, as well as some of the issues with the Engine that I was working through at the time.

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